


Tell Me

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Canon Era, Gen, many years post strike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 05:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17197130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Some would say that Skittery has sold out, but it’s much more complicated than that. Either way, he’s changed a lot over the years.





	Tell Me

“I don’t know what to say around the rest of you anymore,” Skittery mused, walking at David’s side through the apple orchards that surrounded his estate. David could believe it. He called himself Roger now, and held himself straighter as he walked, hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of trousers much nicer than anything ever seen at the newsboys’ lodging house. Skittery’s accent was different as well, so purposefully so that David found it easy to comprehend why his words came out stilted. 

A bunch of the old gang had reconnected at Blink’s funereal. It had been a matter of needing money to bury him, and putting an ad in the paper in hopes of achieving that goal. Skittery had seen and put more towards it than any of them, then showed up to the service, only to spend the whole of it fiddling with the edge of his neatly pressed shirt in uncomfortable silence, while the rest of them reminisced. 

David found it hard not to continuously stare that this new Skittery, who refused to meet his gaze, seemingly preoccupied with the state of his fruit trees. Skittery picked an apple off of one as they passed, and handed it to David with a crooked smile that filled him with a flood of recognition.

“Say what you want,” David advised quickly. “You’re still a newsie.” 

Skittery didn’t look a thing like a newsie anymore, but then neither did David. Maybe that was why Skittery had chosen David to invite back to his place to meet his wife and check out the surroundings. 

“That means a lot,” Skittery said. His accent, this new way of forming words, reminded David of something. He reached out like he was going to pick another apple, but after a glance at the one that David was still holding, he jammed his hands back into his pockets. 

“You know,” Skittery continued. “I’m a sort of scared of the others. I’m afraid they’ll thing I’m trying to be something I ain—- something I’m not.”

“Well,” David started. “Considering you’re policing every word that pops out of your mouth…” 

“That aint’s… isn’t… that’s not it! A lot’s happened, alright?” 

“Okay,” David answered slowly. “Like what?” 

“Getting hitched for one,” Skittery said, with what seemed to David to be a very interesting mingling of shame and pride. 

“I notice none of us were invited to the wedding,” David said. “I would have liked to see it… I haven’t been to a lot of weddings,” David added quickly, upon realizing how harsh he sounded. “Thus far I’ve mostly been to funerals. A wedding would have made a nice change. You know, instead of everybody…” 

David finished off his speech with a vague sweeping gesture, as if the sheer quantity of people dying lately was too vast for words. 

“See!” Skittery burst out. “That’s how it happened. I didn’t want to end up dead or working some dead end job, so I…” 

“Got married to the richest woman you could find?” 

“No!”

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing any of our lot has done.”

Skittery huffed out an annoyed breath.

“I got a job,” he said slowly, enunciating every word. “A respectable one. Working for her pop. Just I had to do a lot of things to get that job.” 

“Like what?” David asked. 

“Like change the way I talked. Get a high school diploma.” 

David raised his eyebrows. “But you didn’t go to high school,” David said. “Or any school for that matter.” 

“So?” Skittery shrugged, in a way that somehow made that gesture seem challenging. David shrugged right back at him, echoing his movements with precision. 

“So…” Skittery shook his head. “So I got somebody to make the diploma for me. You know Shorty, the red headed kid who used to print the papers?” 

“You got him to commit forgery for you?”

“Well, he’s got a knack for the kind of thing. Got me a diploma real quick like. It… well,” Skittery laughed here. “I didn’t know a lot of good schools around here, other than yours, so the diploma says the two of us graduated together. You don’t mind, do you?” 

David had to think about that one. He’d worked hard for his diploma, often at the sacrifice of doing what he truly wanted to in life. That didn’t, however, mean that all of his fellow students had. If you paid the cash to go to school, the teachers tried to at least let you pass, and if you’d passed by the very minimum requirements, that was good enough for most employers. 

“I don’t approve of using fraudulent documents” David said, after a long pause. “But I wish you really had been a student at my school. I would have liked to have had somebody like you to hang around with.” 

Skittery’s face broke into a grin, and in that grin, David got another flash of the person he’d known years ago, when a lousy tenth of a cent had been worth taking on The World for.

“If there’s a reunion I’ll show up with you. We’ll just keep telling those other snots you went to school with that I was a part of the whole thing. We’ll say it over and over ‘til they don’t trust their memory any more. How’s that for a mind game?”

David found himself smiling too. “I’ll give you advice on some events to talk about. Make the others think you were really there.”

Skittery clapped David on the back. “See?” He said. “I knew you was alright… were! Were. Were alright. Damn it all.”

David gave him a look of mock sympathy, “So why don’t you cut the act? You’re not all that good at it. You can’t expect me to believe that your wife doesn’t know all about what’s going on.” 

“She knows plenty,” Skittery said.

“Such as?”

“How I used to have this one pal, Davey, who nobody would give the time of day to before on account of his big mouth, till adversity taught us to see past all his smart ass comments… or at least tolerate ‘em some of the time.” 

“Thanks,” David said. “I’m glad I get a leading role in your life history.” 

“Don’t flatter yourself.” 

“What else have you told her?” 

“Enough.”

“Well, how much is that?”

“Jesus David!” Skittery burst out, with such anger that David was taken aback.

“What?” He asked, pausing in his steps, which had been steady up until then. 

“I told her everything, okay? A long time before she even got it into her head that she wanted to marry me. It weren’t even my idea. She’s the one who insisted on all this. So don’t go makin’ it out like I lied to some innocent little girl and tricked her into marrying me so’s I could get an apple orchard and a fancy house.” 

“… but”

“But what?” Skittery asked. “You think I’m a nobody? That I ain’t got nothin’ goin’ for myself?”

David shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said, holding up his hands in truce. “But you dress differently, and up until now you were talking differently as well, so I just thought…” 

“You think too much.” Skittery said. He slowed down his words, his accent smoothing out into something like David’s own, the one David had been taught at school as part and parcel with his neat cursive script, and ability to explain the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb.

“Sorry,” David said, after they’d walked quietly together for several minutes. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Skittery said. “This is what I expected, to be honest. For the former news boys of Duane Street Lodging House to think I’d gone and sold out.. Thought you might see it differently.” 

David felt a pang of guilt at that. He’d been the only one to get an invite back to Skittery’s place, and he didn’t like thinking it was because Skittery had trusted him in some way, and he’d let him down before he’d spent even a whole two hours in his company. 

“Mush is better about this kind of things,” David said. “You can tell him just about anything and he gets it.” 

“Not Jack?” 

Now it was David’s turn to look at the ground. 

“The reason I talk differently,” Skittery said, “Or the reason I try to at least, is that my wife deserves that. I don’t mean in private. But Mary is a good girl, and her family’s well connected. She knows a lots of people, you know, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think less of her for connecting herself with a gutter rat like me. Besides, her father’s setting me up to run the business when he’s gone. That won’t be for a long time yet, but she needs me to have a good reputation.”

David nodded. 

“I miss the other guys sometimes,” Skittery admitted. “Hearing about what happened to Blink… well, it’s kinda… it’s kinda surreal, you know?” 

“I don’t think anybody has much adjusted to it yet,” David said. 

Skittery nodded, “I get that. I mean, I went from never seeing the guy to never seeing him. It’s not as though we’d be going out for a beer tomorrow if he was still around… it was important, though, knowing that he was around.” Skittery reached out to pluck an apple from one of the trees, and just about shoved it in his face, as though taking a bite out of it had suddenly become the most important thing in the world. 

“Try your apple,” Skittery told David, taking another big bite out of his. David did as he was told. The apple was crisp and sweet, but it didn’t taste much different from the ones he bought at the grocer’s.

“It’s good,” David said politely.

“I’ll send you home with a bag of them,” Skittery said. “And some pie. The cook’s good at making that.” 

“I’ll give it to Mush,” David said. “Tell him it’s from you.” 

Skittery nodded. “Good. I’d like that. Tell him to take care of himself. Maybe I’ll see him around some time.”


End file.
